


Astronomical Futures, Which May or May Not Happen

by wildenessat221b



Category: The Lost Future of Pepperharrow - Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Introspection, M/M, Mori-centric, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Vague descriptions of violence, allusions to, although its set between watchmaker and pepperharrow so there's bs to come, but not in this house, didn't think it warranted an archive warning but please let me know if i'm wrong, katsu being Knowing, love me a bit of introspection, pepperharrow foreshadowing, set before six
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:02:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26286121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wildenessat221b/pseuds/wildenessat221b
Summary: Mori has a question to ask Thaniel.Mori does not know what the answer will be, which makes the hairs on the back of Thaniel's neck stand up and something heavy bubble in his stomach.
Relationships: Keita Mori/Thaniel Steepleton
Comments: 6
Kudos: 40





	Astronomical Futures, Which May or May Not Happen

Filigree Street was ticking, in the innocuous way that it always did, and Mori could hear Thaniel breathing beside him. It had the quality of a railway track, alive with hitches and snags – he could hear branches dragging across windows in the throaty snuffles, gravel spilt across lines in the gentle snores, puffs of smoke in the sporadic huffs. The curtains were open; the ghost of the dark evening and darker night lingered in and around the fireplace, in the form of dead embers and a small congregation of gas lamps, but now the sky was splashed a deep blood orange. Factory smog was settled across the horizon giving the impression of a painting that had been housed in an attic for centuries.

Mori gazed out of the window, vision blurry from sleep but bird-of-prey focused. He lay on his back, hands rested on his thighs. He willed them not to move but they twitched like the cobweb legs of baby sparrows. He was barely breathing and he wouldn’t look at Thaniel. The moment he did, doing so was no longer in his future, it was no longer a mere possibility and there was no rewriting or erasing to be done.

The longer he lay there, the longer he remembered a future in which he turned to his left and Thaniel opened his eyes and told him that he wanted to stay forever.

Something hot and wet caught in his throat. He pushed it down before it could escape, and heard it splash into his stomach like the toll of a solitary church bell. He slid his eyes shut, sunrise still casting cool morning light across his face, and went back to the railway.

The train was a brilliant rainforest green, bolted and edged with the purest of gold. He was on the platform, watching it draw nearer. It rumbled towards him gently. As it grew close, he heard the tinkle of music sounding through an open window. He clasped his hands behind his back.

And then he saw Thaniel. He was seated at the piano stool, shoulders hunched and brow furrowed in concentration. His long fingers were stretched across the keys, his hair falling into his eyes. Resting on top of the piano was a metronome. Tick. Tick. Tick.

The train glided to an elegant halt, then it began to change. Mori watched as the notes of gold that punctuated the green began to tarnish. Confusion settled itself in his bones, but it didn’t take long for everything to become clear. The gold was seeping into Thaniel instead. He shivered a little as his body began to glow, then his brow softened, his shoulders lifted, his fingers relaxed. The music remained crystalline, but even the notes seemed to unwind, turning from a tinkle to something more flowing, something with the quality of a glass harmonica.

A small smile settled across his lips, and he was so beautiful that Mori, still lying in bed, had to bite down on the inside of his cheek. He felt his eyelashes dampen, and turned his head as far to the right as he could.

He wouldn’t look.

He wouldn’t look.

Filigree Street was ticking, in the innocuous way that it always did. Katsu was pottering about, searching for mischief to cause. Watches sat ready for collection. Clockwork animals lifted their heads, yawned, shook their wings, stretched their legs.

Mori was straining his neck so much that it was starting to hurt.

All he could hear was a time bomb.

***

Mori had never felt much like a person.

It got better as he got older. As an adult, he paid his taxes and rode in taxis and read the newspaper. He had his name registered to an address, he had business cards. “Just like them,” he’d whisper to himself sometimes, as he took a sip of tea or a bite of food. “Just like them.”

But while that was true on a physical level, in that he ate and slept and breathed, on a social level far less so.

He was stalked by fear, of two kinds.

The first kind was the more temperate of the two. It saw him as something strange and foreign. This was regardless of what country he was in, whether the people around him looked like he did – it was something woven into the fabric of his living. His strangeness swam in the liquid quality of his movement, a fast-flowing river then a meandering brook, always silent, as though existing as a darting thing afraid of disturbing the molecules that bound the world together. His parts seemed gathered and weaved together from the core elements of some infant mythical past, one where human flesh is an afterthought. He was more like earth or fire or water or air than he was skin, bone or muscle. A waiter had once commented, shyly, that they wouldn’t have been surprised to see him lurking in the background of a medieval painting, or immortalised by chisel in an ancient Greek carving.

Perhaps his watchmaking was a foil to his timelessness. Or perhaps he was just good with cogs.

This kind of fear was the one he preferred - it was merely the deeply human fear of the unknown.

The other kind was animalistic. It was the primal, snarling, biting, teeth bared, claws out _fear of something dangerous._

This kind of fear carried a revolver in its pocket. This type of fear whispered to policemen on street corners. This type of fear wrote letters to the local press and peeped out from behind net curtains as he stepped into cabs and dragged its children across the road in case he tried to talk to them. 

Sometimes this kind of fear pulled his hair out in chunks. Sometimes it kicked him in the ribs. Sometimes it knocked out his teeth. Sometimes it left him bleeding on the pavement, and sometimes he let the snow cover him and watched his death solidify into a vulgar puppet show on his memory.

Sometimes it knew he was a clairvoyant, sometimes it didn’t.

Always he experienced it twice, because when this type of fear knew what it wanted to do to him, it never changed its mind.

“Perfectly fine,” Mori said absently into his teacup. When he looked up, Thaniel was blinking at him. Mori flicked his thumb nail on his front incisor once, sheepishly, then dropped his gaze back into the tea-cup. In his peripheral vision, he saw Thaniel’s fingertips drum lightly on the table.

“There were a thousand silence-breakers swimming around my head just now,” he said softly. “I’d say the one most probable to come out of my mouth was to do with _that._ ” He pointed to the corner of the kitchen, where Katsu was about halfway through emptying a bag of rice onto the floor. Sensing he was being talked about, he stopped, raised his head and shrugged nonchalantly. Then he went back to his work. Thaniel shook his head fondly, then turned back to Mori, who was still examining his tea-cup with the greatest of care. “So the fact that you chose that one instead…”

Mori, still facing downwards, reached down with his hand cupped. Slowly, Katsu abandoned his task (around three-quarters of the way through) and trundled onto it, looking pleased at the invitation. He climbed up Mori’s arm, then settled in the crook of his neck. The two of them shrugged simultaneously.

“Kei…” Thaniel asked tentatively. Then, in the strange way he often found himself doing lately, repeated the question he’d never asked in the first place. “Are you okay?”

Mori considered this for a moment, a moment that stretched out long enough for Thaniel to fold up the newspaper in front of him and for a line to settle in his forehead.

“Yes,” he concluded eventually. “But I have a question.”

Thaniel ran his thumb along his lip. “One with a lot of possible answers, presumably.” Mori nodded minutely. “Should I have a lie down first?”

A single breathy chuckle sounded at the back of Mori’s throat. “Maybe.”

“Think I’d rather get it over with and have the smelling salts on standby for afterwards, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Alright.” He picked for a moment at a loose thread on his trousers, then clasped his hands together under the table. “Are you afraid of me?”

Thaniel’s frown deepened. He pushed his empty plate to the side, as though clearing a path between him and Mori. “What’s brought this –“

“Please. Are you?”

Thaniel threaded his fingers together in a prayer position, elbows on the table, and rested his frowning lips on his knuckles. Mori felt the ground of his mental landscape shudder like the earthquakes of his childhood, as the futures in which he received an immediate “no” crumbled like a disturbed tomb. The immediate “yes” futures died too, but they did it quietly.

Katsu was quiet and still on his shoulder. The ticking time bomb of the house grew louder. Mori felt that it would be tempting fate to count the seconds, but he was up to forty-seven by the time Thaniel answered.

“Yes. Yes, a little.”

Mori didn’t nod, or shake his head, or cry, or make a sound. Thaniel continued, “I am a little afraid of you, because you have so much power, but there is such a sporadic security to it. Every signal might be pointing you in one direction and then it might flip at the last second – your brain must be like a map, where you turn the page and suddenly there’s ink splodges everywhere, I can’t even begin to – anyway.” He looked from side to side nervously before he did it, causing two futures to clash like ships in the night and making Mori wince, but he knelt in front of him and took his hand. “I am afraid that you may pin something astronomical to a future that doesn’t end up happening, and that it will destroy you. Because if you destroy yourself, it will destroy me. That is what I’m afraid of.”

Mori swallowed, hard. The backs of his hands hurt where his fingernails were burrowing in. 

“I’m dangerous, you know.”

Thaniel’s grip shifted. He met Mori's gaze determinedly. 

“Keita. What I said before. _That is what I’m afraid of._ Nothing more.”

Katsu climbed down from Mori’s shoulder and clamped himself across their joined hands.

Mori nodded, and bit his tongue copper against the urge to tell Thaniel that he was wrong.

_And that the second type of fear was right._

***

Mori felt Thaniel watching him for the rest of the day. Not that he stalked, or intruded, or lurked – the poor bugger was far too English and far too self-conscious to do that – but he played the piano a little quieter as though listening for a summons, tread a little softer, suggested a tea break ten minutes earlier, like he couldn’t wait for an excuse to be in a room with Mori again.

He was also chased-rabbit nervous, his leg kept bouncing up and down and his lips were growing sore from being bitten.

It wasn’t until the fire was lit and the windows shut against the unseasonably wintery autumn night that he finally asked the question that Mori had been remembering and rehearsing for all day.

“I didn’t upset you, did I? When I explained about… the question you asked?”

Mori shook his head and made himself smile. “Not one bit, quite the opposite. You were honest, and it wouldn’t have done either of us any good to flounce about in one of the many possibilities where you hadn’t been.”

Thaniel examined him. He took in the gentle splay of his fingers across his lap, the curve of his jacket across his shoulders, the sharp lines of his jaw. Something was tense. Finally, he reached his face. His eyes were reflecting the red-orange glow of the fire and they were glassy and wandering. He watched as this throat expanded and then flattened as he swallowed, harder than could have possibly been innocuous.

“Then why do you still look… I don’t know… uneasy?”

Mori’s meandering gaze snapped to meet his and widened. His mouth dropped open for a split second. Thaniel had caught him off guard. There must have been a high probability that he’d kept that question to himself, which lit a flare of insecurity in his belly. Damn his unassertiveness, damn that even the universe knew it. He extinguished the flare as quickly as he could, as Mori looked to be schooling his own form into a picture of contentment.

“Let’s go to bed,” he said quietly, his voice the delicate gold of a watch chain. 

***

“Talk to me, Keita,” Thaniel whispered, braver in the dark.

Mori, aware that he couldn't see it, shook his head. 

“Not now, not yet. Nothing’s clear.”

_there was a burnt castle and a burnt body and a hacking cough and the crackle of electricity and lightbulbs and lightbulbs and the smells of his childhood and a room and a needle and cold cold cold cold cold and an inked wrist and a rumbling belly and the horrid horrid assuredness that something everything was all his fault_

“What if I can… clear something up?”

Mori smiled sadly.

“Doesn’t work like that.”

“Of course it doesn’t,” Thaniel said glumly, somehow managing to make it sound like inadequacy on his own part. Mori pulled him onto his chest and threaded his fingertips through the soft hair at the nape of his neck.

“Right now, we’re golden,” he whispered into his temple. “Tonight we needn’t have a care in the world.”

“All night?” Thaniel mumbled, ten percent joking, ninety not, but trying to make it sound like the reverse.

“All night,” Mori replied.

And this time he looked, and Thaniel’s eyelashes were closed and delicate like a butterfly’s wings and his mouth was drooping with sleep and he could almost have been glowing.

And it didn’t matter that he didn’t say he was going to stay forever, because he was going to stay for tonight, and the future was the future and that was that.

Just like it was for _real people._

Wind rattled through the gutters and if Thaniel was awake, he’d be able to tell him what colour it was.

But he was breathing softly and it was warm on Mori’s chest, and Filigree Street was ticking, in the innocuous way that it always did.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading, a comment would make my heart sing! New to this little fandom, so hello new friends!  
> Shout out to @waistcoat35 both for introducing me to this weird and wonderful world and for being a general delight.


End file.
